Toni Morrison

Chloe Ardelia Wofford was born in Lorain, Ohio, on the eighteenth of February 1931, the daughter of George and Ramah Wofford, formerly of Alabama and Georgia. She took her undergraduate degree at Howard and her master's at Cornell, then taught at Texas Southern and at Howard. She married the Jamaican architect Harold Morrison in 1958; they divorced in 1964. She kept his name.

She joined Random House in 1967 as a senior editor of fiction — the first Black woman senior editor in the firm's history. She was, in her first decade there, the editor who acquired and championed the work of Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, Gayl Jones, June Jordan, and Angela Davis, among others. She edited The Black Book (1974), the foundational Black-American visual history. Her own first novel, The Bluest Eye, appeared in 1970.

She produced, over the next forty years, eleven novels. Sula (1973). Song of Solomon (1977). Tar Baby (1981). Beloved (1987) — the novel about an enslaved mother who killed her infant rather than see her returned to slavery, drawn from the 1856 case of Margaret Garner — for which she won the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1993 she received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Black woman so honored. The Nobel citation noted that she "in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." She continued to write through the next decade; her last novel, God Help the Child, appeared in 2015.

She died in New York on the fifth of August 2019, age eighty-eight.

She is honored here as the editor and novelist who made the American novel reckon with what it had been built upon.